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In Part I of this article, “Sea Power: The Global Navy,” published last month, the author concluded that the threats posed by the Soviet Navy can be overcome by the U. S. Navy as it is now composed: with its “dual paradigms,” the carrier battle group and the nuclear attack submarine.
If the Navy of nuclear attack submarines and carrier battle groups is the one the United States needs, why discuss changes? Because voting for these forces does not mean they are perfect. Because sea power consists of more than force structure. Because our Navy probably does not realize its full readiness potential. Peacetime permits pursuit of improvements; we have opportunities available to us to perfect sea power. At the outset, however, there must be an understanding that the U. S. Navy is sound and in good health. The following proposals pertain to a military organization that its members and the nation should view as a professional service, well- equipped, capable, and worthy of great pride.
Attack Submarines: Any review of submarine tasking in the war plans versus current submarine numbers yields a crystal-clear proclamation: we need more boats. This is more than the garden-variety, strategy-structure mismatch that pervades all our defense planning (the result of minimum-risk thinking and the nature of persuasion in the political process). We are approaching a critical balance in which Soviet numbers may begin to prevail over the quality superiority of U. S. submarines. As a force multiplier, the modem submarine has no equal. Each one added to the U. S. order of battle above the critical balance will yield positive results in combat; every additional submarine is a large contribution to the forces above the critical point. We need more than we have.
In the past decade, U. S. submarines have assumed an added task—protecting carrier battle groups. In this role, submarines have proven essential. Thus how many submarines we have bears not only on how well traditional submarine tasks can be accomplished but also on how sur- vivable our carrier battle groups will be in combat. The Los Angeles (SSN-688) class was designed to accomplish the direct support role in addition to the other missions of the attack submarine,* but the numbers built do not yet meet all requirements.
I *These missions include antisubmarine warfare, sea denial, blockade, attrition war's fare, ballistic missile submarine protection, antiballistic missile submarine opera- Ss tions, strike warfare with cruise missiles, and special operations.
Current planning for submarine new construction is realistic and adequate. But we must be concerned with the near future, in which cuts in Navy funding are a distinct possibility. If funds do go down, a fair-share cutback of submarine starts could cause the whole Navy to go down.
Carrier Battle Group Design: We should quit designing ships and start designing battle groups. The carrier battle group is not simply an assemblage of ships, it is the smallest survivable surface formation, the organic entity with which we fight. Currently, we gather an all-star team of best-design surface warships and cluster them around an optimum-design aircraft carrier. Collectively, this battle group possesses great naval power, but each individual ship is overdesigned and overbuilt for her particular role in the formation. Although the image of the independent surface raider is woven into the psyche of the naval officer, the day of needing—and affording—all-purpose warships is past. The current battle group shows the weakness of all-star teams—too much individual talent. The fleet needs cohesiveness and complementary strength in a battle group comprised of ships that can only survive in mutual support. The way to get this strength with essential economy is to specialize ship design.
We must specialize to permit:
► Optimum ship design around a single mission without the compromises and competition inherent in the multimission design of warships
► Larger numbers of cheaper, one-job warships to be built in place of the small number of expensive super-ships to which we are now committed
► Training and readiness in individual ships to focus on a single task
Do not ignore the third reason. Ask a destroyerman why he is not much good in a warfare area, and the answer is always “There’s too much else to do.” We ask too much of the captains and crews of our surface warships. They are expected to do well across a dog’s breakfast of missions: antisubmarine warfare, antiair warfare, antisurface warfare, shore bombardment, air control, and electronic warfare. A ship gets good at one of these only by largely ignoring the rest. Ship design and readiness both improve if each of the battle group’s surface warships are built for a single primary mission. Other systems would have to be installed, but only for close-in self-defense. Full expertise would be expected only for the primary mission.
Aircraft Carriers: Paraphrasing Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the three rules of battle group warfare are: (1) Keep the carrier afloat. (2) Keep the carrier afloat. (3) Keep the carrier afloat. The battle group’s sensors, defensive capability, and offensive strength are fatally weak without the carrier—or, more correctly, without the carrier air wing. The aircraft, not the ship, are the power of the battle group. The ship is simply an airfield.
The ship has vulnerabilities. The aircraft carrier is the fattest target afloat. So much combat strength resides in a single carrier that an enemy must and will concentrate all his effort on sinking her. The carrier is so powerful that her existence may even, of herself, invoke attack with
tactical nuclear weapons. (The Soviets have tactical nuclear weapons and practice their employment. Carrier design based on the assumption that war at sea will only be conventional is dangerous folly.) Conventional attack or t nuclear, soft-kill or sunk, the carrier in her present size is an attractive nuisance that invites—demands—attack. '
Sound reasons exist for large-carrier design, but the costs limit the number of carriers built, and the price of increasing that number is the displacement of many other necessary expenditures. The arguments of small-carrier advocates become persuasive in a combat environment of tactical nuclear weapons and large numbers of enemy submarines. In this war scenario, the benefits of placing the battle group’s aircraft on many small platforms outweigh the marginal cost advantages of a large-hull design.
Carrier battle groups are the naval force of the present and the future, but they must be given a longer life expectancy in combat by getting their valuable eggs off too small a number of baskets and onto more, smaller ones.
Aircraft: Technology offers a new option in the design of carrier aircraft—a choice between high performance in the aircraft itself or in its weapons. If resources were unlimited, the choice would be both, but funding demands a more serious look at the question.
The complex business of managing an aircraft carrier demands attention also. A week’s work in an operating carrier makes space exploration look simple. If we could convince ourselves that smart weapons and miniaturized avionics permit simplification in aircraft design, funding and the carrier management problem could benefit.
There is a proposal for continued exploration of a universal airframe, a basic aircraft which, when mated with appropriate weapons, avionics, and stores, would replace all our existing fixed-wing carrier planes. I suspect the design would greatly resemble the current S-3 Viking'
Each year, technology makes this a less radical idea. The advantages of a carrier air navy comprised of just one aircraft type would be enormous in maintenance, training, logistics support, and aircraft cost. The carrier’s design could also be simplified. Therefore, more carriers could be built for the same money, and the transition to the smaller carriers, which are essential to survival, would be eased.
‘ ‘Daily Practice with Guns’ ’: Technology has dealt a cruel blow. As our weapons get better, their cost, range, and other characteristics have made it too difficult to carry out Thomas Truxtun’s dictum. We are riding around with a load of silver bullets with which we have little fleet experience.
Harpoon, Tomahawk, Mk-46 torpedo, ASROC, SUBROC, Standard, Phalanx, Sea Sparrow, Phoenix— nobody shoots enough of these weapons to know if they are any good with them. Nobody shoots enough to close the design loop with fleet experience. Nobody shoots enough to learn enough to drive tactics. Acceptance testing and evaluation firings tell us a weapon works, but they do not tell us about the readiness and effectiveness of the entire weapon system, including ship, crew, and tactics-
ut sea
^ Extraordinary emphasis on skill with weapons in the Professional ethic of the submarine service All this costs money, but spending more is not the solu- h°n to fix weaknesses in weapons training. We need to sPend smarter, weaving the need to practice and train into lhe overall program definition of a weapon system and Peking a balanced program aimed at total effectiveness rather than merely buying bullets. The goal is wartime
Complex weapons do exist with excellent training support. For example, the Mk-48 torpedo and submarine- punched ballistic missiles allow for training that provides the skill building and fleet feedback needed to perfect the Weapons and to maintain high readiness. In combination, these systems offer a menu of training choices we should c°nsult in improving other weapons and designing new ones. They provide:
' An adequate inventory of recoverable training rounds and good recovery skills
p A program to purchase expendable training rounds in adequate numbers throughout the life cycle p Realistic, sophisticated team training facilities, with tegular crew training and certification ' Regular firing exercises at sea, with emphasis on tactical realism, casualty control, and the ability to keep firing ^nd get hits under all conditions
£ Realistic training modes built into shipboard equipment * Special emphasis in training prospective commanding °Ricers in these weapon systems, including tactical firings standards of excellence. We should settle fpr no less; paper readiness ratings are a delusion if not based on demonstrated skill. Every warplane pilot and warship captain must be a gunfighter who thinks his unit’s weapons are his own and who knows through constant practice that he is the fastest gun in town.
Some patching and catch up are probably needed on the weapons listed earlier. For these and for future weapon systems alike, we should use more wit in tackling the weapon training problem. Using light beams instead of live ammunition, using training software to drive tactical displays on board ship, using game technology to make us better at our game—these ideas are barely scratched in the training design of Navy weapon systems. We need to trail, one of our youngsters to an arcade and watch how he learns eye-hand coordination, quick decisions, tactics, strategy, asset conservation—skills that much resemble weapon skills. We need star-wars training to accompany our star-wars weapons. We need to buy an adequate number of training rounds and then exploit technology to round out readiness training.
Carrier battle groups are the naval force of the present and the future, but they must be given a longer life expectancy in combat by getting their valuable eggs out of too small a number of baskets and into more, smaller ones.
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USS FORRESTAL (CV-59)
Communities and Careers: Community rivalry is a festering problem in the corps of naval line officers. Some tension is inevitable and a bit may even be good, but what is worrisome about the present stage is that it is based in ignorance, ignorance that stems from community isolation. If the various bodies of community knowledge were truly independent, rivalry could persist without great harm. The fact is, however, our lack of knowledge about the parts of the Navy not directly associated with our individual warfare specialty is keeping the sea power of the U. S. Navy from achieving its fullest potential.
We must solve this problem for three reasons.
► The degree of integration needed in battle group warfare is so great, it demands a high level of cross-community knowledge. We hack away at this with a short training course and on-the-job training, but we end up short of where we would be if all the line officers in the battle group really understood all parts of the game.
► The community wiring of the Navy dissipates at higher levels of responsibility; our flag officers generally function across community lines. Because of the degree to which home-community loyalty and other-community ignorance are woven into our officers of flag potential, the Navy is ill-served.
► Other communities have knowledge that officers need in their home community. Ignorance tends to have a compound nature—if you don’t know something, you often don’t know you don’t know it. We often do not know some surprisingly basic facts about our own line of work, facts well understood in other communities and readily available if only we knew to ask.
Although the problem of “community-ism” has been discussed for years, little improvement has been made. Why? Because all we have done is talk, without changing the structural conditions that create the problem. The hard fact is that we are bom into a community and remain on rails in that community for most of our careers. Tours of duty out-of-community are not usually career enhancing, and even if they were, small opportunity exists. The artificial business of career advancement has gotten in the way of the real task of developing professionally as line offi' cers and warriors. We focus on our warfare specialities and give insufficient attention to our development as broad-based officers able to think and plan and fight in the Navy as a whole.
The problem is a tough one. The solution probably lieS in changes that permit and encourage cross-community tours throughout an officer’s career. Education is embedded in the solution. The war college approach should be emphasized more, even to the extent of substituting war college for traditional postgraduate education. The greatest impact could result from cross-tours at sea.
Having acknowledged the problem, we need to act. If 3 destroyer wardroom, a submarine wardroom, and an air squadron were locked in a room with a blackboard and given two hours to brainstorm the issue, we would obtain a rich menu of positive actions to break down community isolation. We need this menu. We must explore alternatives to doing everything by community, especially in career management, selection criteria, and assignment patterns. Currently, cross-tours are harmful to the individual and threatening to the community to which the office moves. This must change.
Sea Power: Peacetime gives the U. S. Navy the chance to perfect itself, to combine force structure and professionalism into a powerful naval machine evermore capable of exercising sea power worldwide. We have the finest Navy in the world. The future gives us opportunity to continue improving our force, to enhance our readiness, and to grow professionally. We can live within our normal budget if we exercise wit and forehandedness, recognizing opportunities and seizing them. The U. S. Navy must always be able to echo then-Commander Joseph K. Taussig’s words at Queenstown, Ireland, in 1917: “We arc ready now.”
Commander Byron is a line officer who writes on naval topics.
Hats Off to the Prof
The professor of one of my son’s classes reminisced during class one day about when he was a student, and his college was entirely military. He and his fellow students were waiting for a lecture to begin. The only evidence of their professor was his hat laying on his desk. The students, after waiting the accepted ten minutes, left the classroom, because the professor still had not showed up.
The next day, the professor berated the class for having left the previous day. When he was reminded of the ten-minute rule, he replied, “When my hat is here, I am here!”
The following day, the professor entered the classroom. It was devoid of students. In their places were 36 hats.
Lieutenant Commander Millard F. Kirk, U. S. Naval Reserve (Retired)
(The Naval Institute will pay $25.00 for each anecdote published in the Proceedings.)